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Regardless of your profession, your eyes work hard all day long and the only time off they get is when you’re sleeping. The eyes are the busiest muscles in our bodies and they can easily get overworked.

Maybe you’re so focused on your work that you don’t blink enough? Not blinking enough can lead to the painful symptoms of dry eyes. Perhaps you work in poorly lit or overly lit conditions? This can cause your eyes to become fatigued and leads to the symptoms of eyestrain.

When you’re working hard, it’s important to remember how hard your eyes are working for you. In this post, we’ll introduce you to three easy ways you can refresh your eyes and reinvigorate your vision.

All of the glare and lights from electronic devices can lead to eyestrain. If you spend a lot of time looking at screens during your days, it’s important to take a few minutes every hour or so and take a break from the technology overload.

Whether you need to turn off all the electronics or simply leave your cubicle, give your eyes a well-deserved break and let them look at normal daylight for a bit. Try and make this a regular part of your daily routine.

And while you are on the computer or do any close up work, make (10-10-10 rule: (10-10-10: Every 10 minutes, look at something 10 feet away, for at least 10 seconds).

This short vision break is so important that we have included Rebuild Your Vision Defense Software in our Rebuild Your Vision Program that reminds you to take a vision break every 10 minutes while you’re on the computer.

Blink

Believe it or not, blinking is actually crucial to your eye functioning. You probably don’t realize it, but when you’re staring at a screen all day, it’s very easy to ‘forget’ to blink.

The average eye optimally should blink 10 times a minute but when we are focused on an object (such as a computer), the blink rate decreases to only two times a minute!

Blinking is an important way to replenish our eyes with natural lubrication.

When you don’t blink enough, your eyes may start to feel dry and burn or itch. Start focusing on how much you blink and try to increase it. If you experience symptoms of dry eye, making frequent blinking a habit could help to significantly reduce these symptoms.

Focus

If your eyes are feeling tired, a simple focusing exercise may be just what the doctor ordered! This focusing exercise is very simple to do.

Start by looking at an object that’s nearby, about six inches or so away. You could even hold your hand up and study it. Hold your gaze for a few seconds and then find an object that’s about 10 feet away from you – perhaps it’s a cubicle across the room or a tree outside your window. Hold your gaze on it for a few seconds and then switch back to your chosen up-close object. Keep switching your gaze from near to far for about 10 to 15 times.

This exercise helps you to flex your eye muscles. Think of it as a kind of yoga for your eyes!

Remember, by taking a short break, blinking and adding the simple exercise into your daily routine, you can reduce eyestrain and keep your eyes happy and healthy!

Source control is essential to any software developer. SVN has always been the standard after CVS, but as soon as Linus Travolds introduced Git to the world, back in 2005, everything changed.

Git is a distributed source control software, and although it wasn't the first distributed system, it certainly proved itself; if it works for the largest open source software project (Linux Kernel) certainly it is that good.
But if you are comfortable with SVN and its centralized nature, git is flexible enough to support a work-flow similar to SVN.

In this article we will setup a git server on a Linux machine accessible through a network and ssh. This server can have many repositories for multiple users. The setup is excellent for small team that needs private git repositories without all the bells and whistles of large git cloud repository services like Github.

Following is our agenda:

Git User Setup
Single Repo Setup
Allow Team Access

Git User Setup

We will run the following commands inside the terminal of the git server. You will need a root privilege to execute these commands, so you can use sudo before each command that you can't run or print the following command first:

$ sudo bash

But be careful, using the previous command can damage your system if you don't know what the commands do.

This will create a special git repository with the name projectname.git. In this repository you wouldn't see all the files and folders that you have commited in your own local project, instead these are the files needed by git to represent the project and the changes done to its files and folders.

Next step is to make sure that you can access the repository using ssh protocol. Because the setup of ssh vary from system to system, you will need to search the web to find how to activate the ssh daemon on the git repo server. You can test if the daemon is enabled or not by trying the following command.

$ ssh git@localhost

If the command asked for "git" password, then the ssh daemon works and you can proceed to the following step.
Allow Team Access

The following steps need to be done for each team member who needs access the repository.
Please note that this will allow each team member to access all repositories on the git repo server. If you need a separate account to different teams you will have to repeat the first step with a user for each different team.

Each team member will generate an ssh key, and send their public ssh key to the git repo server in order to authenticate their and allow to "push" their changes to the repo.

$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa):
Created directory '/home/user/.ssh'.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

As you can see, you don't need to provide any input, just hit Enter where promoted for input until you generate the key.

$ ssh-copy-id git@SERVER_IP

This command will send your public ssh key to the git repo server, so you need to replace the SERVER_IP with the actual IP of the server or the server domain name if it's accessible through DNS.
This command will ask you for "git" user password on the server, that's why each team member must know the "git" password, but doesn't need to remember it.
A workaround would be to manually add each team member public ssh key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on the git home folder.

To add the new repository as a remote to your current working repo use the following command.

If you find yourself lost at any point or need help, you will find plenty of online resources to get help from. I personally recommend the official git documentation. as a good place to get started.

In a small to medium size team, working on the same remote repository in an SVN like workflow can work, but needs continuous integration and high level of communication in order to ensure that all conflicts are discovered and resolved as soon as possible.

They tell you life is easy and beautiful all the time and if you’re happy it will always go smooth without any troubles or difficulties? LIARS!

As a matter of fact, life has to have hardships and pain because that’s the only way you’ll truly take pleasure in the good times. You won’t know how happiness really feels like if all you know is being content; not until you have gone through something else and compared your life during and after a hardship.

However, the trick is not only about convincing yourself that after a difficulty has passed the good times will follow; the real trick is actually during the turbulent times when you choose to challenge yourself that you will get over it; so you start analyzing the problem, innovating the solutions or ways that will help you overcome it, acting and implementing those solutions step by step, even if slowly but consistently and always envisioning yourself celebrating and enjoying the success of defeating that problem as well as gaining more confidence, more knowledge and the power to be in control of your life.

It’s always during those hard times that people excel and reveal their true and best capabilities; just like the stars that twinkle and sparkle best when it’s the darkest and that’s also when you enjoy the bright moon, or like gold that has to go through fire to be purified, or the diamonds that have to go through harsh polishing phases & cut into pieces to be so beautifully shaped and sparkles with those amazing colors.

Those people who shine at those times are mostly viewed as lucky people who had everything at their hands to succeed; well, they did, they had the positive mindset, they had the willingness to act, they had the desire to create and innovate, they had the passion to enjoy what they do, they had the control over their inner switch which they turned on and it activated the leader inside to guide them to their objectives without the need of someone else leading them or telling them you can do it because you have the power to. They are seen as happy people because they are lucky, when actually the adjective that combines the words “happy” with “lucky” is the “happy-go-lucky” and not vice versa. They might not be lucky to have rocks thrown at them, but they are surely happy people to be able to view those rocks as being thrown to them to help them in building themselves a staircase to move up.

But if it’s a matter of choice and capability that everyone can have, why do a lot of people have endless difficulties and they seem to be forever drowned in that bottomless well of problems? Because most probably they approach the problems with the most common mindset; the problem is huge and I won’t defeat it by myself. They choose to switch off the inner leader and commander within them that would know how to go through such an obstacle and becomes a stronger person; yes, they choose to give themselves the infamous excuse of I can’t do it. Maybe they don’t want to do some effort by stepping out of the darker room to the brighter one. At the end, it’s their call to act or not, to act positively or passively.

You have the choice to perceive situations and circumstances as problems or ways of growth and enhancements, and you have the choice to approach each with a determination to defeat and learn from or to be defeated by them. And remember, there won’t be rainbows without the rain, and it’s during the rain that view becomes clearer and new things start to grow.